Interview with Isabel Kelley

Isabel’s voice bubbles with excitement at the prospect of the long-awaited, long-anticipated Symposium finally becoming a reality.  Unlike solo studio surroundings, it’s a different energy, she says, working with like-minded people and interacting with an appreciative audience. 

Most of the time, she says, she has a specific idea and a plan before she begins a project. It inevitably evolves and develops as the planning, and the actual work, progress.

With so many months of looking forward to the Hallowell Symposium, Isabel has entertained various ideas for her sculpture contribution, but has now narrowed down her focus, honing in on one vision. “Hallowell granite is such a bright, white stone— it inspires me to create something fluid and organic,” she says. 

The concept grew out of another piece she completed recently. That work, titled “The Spirit I Crave,” was designed as a memorial tribute— exuding the solid, heavy weight of permanence, but the individual elements, while grounded, yet meeting perfectly at the other end. 

“I’ve been working with elegant, elongated, sort of cylindrical forms,”

she explains. She whimsically refers to them as giant stone “noodles,” but quickly points out that these forms, unlike uniform spaghetti noodles or pool noodles, taper gracefully here and there. She plans to create a group of these upright forms, clustered like a light shining, or a fountain reaching, upward.   

Isabel will have a small model and drawings on display at her workspace, so that visitors will be able to share her original vision of the finished work as the Symposium and the art progress.